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To: William Tell
I see you wrote parent's and not parents'.

Yes, indeed, as guided by the Immigration and Naturalization act of 1790.

What possible sense would it make to exclude only those who had two foreign parents. How is a person's loyalty not divided by having even one parent who is not a citizen?

The purpose was to exclude naturalized citizens. Citizens by birth could easily include those whose mothers were not citizens, or at least not citizens by birth. Remember in those days, only the citizenship of the father was it issue. The citizenship of women was far more mutable and of minimal concern. After all women could not vote or hold office. We need to keep this historical lens in mind when thinking about how these things relate to our time, and allow the sexes to be reversed, allowing both citizen fathers and mothers to bequeath citizenship.

We also know that the men of the time almost immediately legislated to the effect that children of citizens born "beyond the sea" were to be considered natural born citizens. Clearly these men were expressing a will to reduce the significance of jus solis and increase the significance of jus sanguinis.

Finally, I wish to point out that this issue of divided loyalty gets far too much importance attached. Dual nationality CANNOT be the criterion for determining whether or not someone is 'natural born' since it is not our polity, but theirs, who determines nationality in other nations. If dual nationality were the criterion, we would have the absurd situation where Donald Trump, without question a natural born citizen on both jus solis and jus sanguinis bases to be excluded from the Presidency due to his dual American - British nationality. That would be a truly absurd result, but one that is entirely consistent with the facts of his birth.

For these reasons, and because the Vattel hypothesis regarding natural born citizenship leads to other similarly absurd results in todays world of equality between the sexes, it can't be sustained.

113 posted on 01/11/2016 11:35:00 PM PST by John Valentine (Deep in the Heart of Texas)
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To: John Valentine
John Valentine said: "Dual nationality CANNOT be the criterion for determining whether or not someone is 'natural born' since it is not our polity, but theirs, who determines nationality in other nations. "

If both parents are citizens, then the dual citizenship of the parents is of no concern. The concern is when one of the parents is not a citizen at all and might conceivably have NO loyalty to the nation.

Is a child born in a foreign land to a naturalized U.S. citizen and a non-citizen "natural born"? I don't believe that is what our Founders intended.

114 posted on 01/11/2016 11:56:10 PM PST by William Tell
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